Orleans Parish School Board
| Orleans Parish School Board | |
|---|---|
 |
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3520 General De Gaulle Drive New Orleans, LA 70114 United States |
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| Coordinates | 29°55′44″N 90°01′15″W / 29.928789°N 90.020757°WCoordinates: 29°55′44″N 90°01′15″W / 29.928789°N 90.020757°W |
| District information | |
| Type | Public |
| Motto | Our job is building for the future |
| Grades | PK - 12 |
| Established | 1841 |
| President | Seth J. Bloom |
| Superintendent | Henderson Lewis |
| Schools | 20 |
| District ID | 2201170 |
| Students and staff | |
| Students | approximately 15,500 (excludes RSD- & BESE-chartered public schools) |
| Other information | |
| Website |
www |
New Orleans Public Schools (NOPS) is the public school system that serves all of New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. Schools within the system are governed by a multitude of entities, including the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB), which directly administers 6 schools and has granted charters to another 18, and the Recovery School District of Louisiana (RSD), which no longer directly administers any schools within Orleans Parish. Instead, all public schools operating under the RSD umbrella within Orleans Parish are, as of the Fall of 2014, independent public charter schools. Though the Orleans Parish School Board has retained ownership of all the assets of the New Orleans Public Schools system, including all school buildings, approximately 93% of students attending public schools in Orleans Parish now attend independent public charter schools – the highest percentage in the nation. The headquarters of the OPSB is in the West Bank neighborhood of Algiers, while the RSD's New Orleans office is on Poydras Street in the CBD.
NOPS was wholly controlled by the OPSB before Hurricane Katrina and was the New Orleans area's largest school district before Katrina devastated the city in August 2005, damaging or destroying more than 100 of the district's 128 school buildings. NOPS served approximately 65,000 students pre-Katrina. For decades prior to Hurricane Katrina's landfall, the OPSB-administered system was widely recognized as the lowest performing school district in Louisiana. According to researchers Carl L. Bankston and Stephen J. Caldas, only 12 of the 103 public schools then in operation within the city limits of New Orleans showed reasonably good performance at the beginning of the 21st century.
In Katrina's immediate aftermath, an overwhelmed Orleans Parish School Board asserted that the school system would remain closed indefinitely. The Louisiana Legislature took advantage of this abdication of local leadership and acted swiftly. As a result of legislation passed by the state in November 2005, 102 of the city's worst-performing public schools were transferred to the Recovery School District (RSD), which is operated by the Louisiana Department of Education and was headed for a key period (2008-2011) by noted education leader Paul Vallas. The Recovery School District had been created in 2003 to allow the state to take over failing schools, those that fell into a certain "worst-performing" metric. Five public schools in New Orleans had been transferred to RSD control prior to Katrina.
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Wikipedia